Nitter says it will continue despite X Corp’s cease-and-desist

Two weeks after X Corp’s lawyers demanded it disappear, Nitter is coming back. The open-source project posted a two-line notice on Monday saying it will continue, following legal advice. It did not say what that advice was.

The notice sits on nitter.net, struck through the old cease-and-desist banner. “Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue,” it reads. “This instance and others will be back up and running shortly.” The maintainer works under the handle zedeus. He promised a fuller announcement within a week.

Richard Speed reported the reversal for The Register. The publication asked X for comment and had received no response.

What TNW could confirm

Some of this is already visible rather than promised. XCancel, the best-known public instance built on Nitter’s code, was serving pages again on Monday. TNW loaded it on Tuesday and it was still up.

The GitHub repository has also come back. Archiving it, which the project did after the letters arrived, freezes a repository and makes it read-only. As of Tuesday it is publicly accessible again and shows no archive notice. The README carries the same update as the website.

The main nitter.net instance has not resumed normal service. So the position is mixed. A project says it is continuing, a repository is live, one large instance is running, and the flagship remains dark.

The letters that started it

X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters on 24 August. They demanded permanent removal of Nitter instances and of the project’s repository. For a while they worked. Instances went dark, the repository froze, and Nitter went offline after seven years.

Nitter is a front end for reading posts on X. It needs no account, runs no JavaScript and carries no advertising. Every request goes through its own backend, so X never sees the reader’s address or browser fingerprint. You cannot post through it. You can only read what is already public.

That last point matters. Nitter republishes no private material and competes for no advertising. It strips the tracking and the account requirement from public posts, and those are the parts X monetises.

The project has never been a stable target either. It reads X through the platform’s unofficial API, which X keeps changing, so each round of restrictions forces a rebuild. Instance operators, not the maintainer, carry most of that cost. That is one reason the number of working public instances has shrunk for years, letters or no letters.

Why the advice might have been encouraging

The project has not said what changed its mind, so this is context rather than explanation. But the legal weather around scraping has shifted, and it has moved in the direction of the scrapers.

In July a US court dismissed Google’s DMCA claims against SerpApi, a company built on scraping Google’s own results. TNW covered the ruling as the moment others can scrape Google. On that reasoning, reading public pages is not automatically infringement or circumvention.

Money is moving on the same assumption. Oxylabs, the Lithuanian web-data firm, raised $130mn from Warburg Pincus in July at a $3.6bn valuation. The premise is that gathering public web data at scale is a legitimate business. A volunteer project reading public posts is a smaller version of the same argument.

None of that is a ruling in Nitter’s favour. A cease-and-desist letter is a demand, not a judgment, and X has not sued. The letters simply asserted what X wanted. Someone appears to have told zedeus those assertions were weaker than they looked.

The asymmetry has not gone away

Whatever the advice said, the underlying imbalance is unchanged. On one side is a company owned by the world’s richest man. On the other is a maintainer with a pseudonym, a Matrix channel and a donations page.

There is a limit to what a letter can undo, though. Nitter is published under the AGPLv3, and licences of that kind are not revocable. Copies already distributed stay licensed, whatever happens to the original repository. That is why demands aimed at a repository rarely remove the software itself, and why one instance stayed reachable while the project decided what to do.

European regulators have started noticing that this asymmetry has consequences. The Cyber Resilience Act pulls unpaid maintainers into compliance obligations built for companies, including a 24-hour disclosure deadline. The recurring problem is the same in both cases. Infrastructure that millions rely on often rests on people with no legal department.

Nitter has been here before, without any lawyers. In January 2024 zedeus declared the project dead after X disabled the guest accounts it relied on. It returned a year later using account sessions. Hosting an instance, he warned at the time, was nowhere near as easy as it used to be.

What is actually resolved

Very little, which is worth saying plainly. The promised announcement has not arrived. X has not commented, has not withdrawn the letters publicly, and retains every option it had two weeks ago. Suing is one of them.

The reason people keep rebuilding this thing is not nostalgia for Twitter. Public institutions, newsrooms, universities and emergency services still post there. Reading them means holding an account with a company many readers would rather avoid entirely. Nitter is the workaround, and tools for reading social platforms on your own terms keep drawing acquirers rather than fading.

What the next week produces is the thing to watch. Either zedeus explains the legal position and the flagship instance returns, or the announcement slips and this becomes another quiet retreat. Two weeks ago the obituary looked safe to write. It was not.